Berg Fashion Library portal to debut

From dance costumes in French Polynesia to New York`s runway couture, the Berg Fashion Library promises to be an online source for those who have pored over pages of international fashion magazines, or pondered the meaning of dress from the burka to the brassiere. The resource spans the globe and the centuries to uncover the vastness of world dress and costume culture.

Launching in September 2010, the library is a new portal that offers users fully cross-searchable access to an expanding range of Berg content that also includes the Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion in a convenient format. With an abundance of images, e-books, and reference works, this accessible resource has a lot to offer.

Features of the Berg Fashion Library include:

Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion: 3.6 million words and the equivalent of 10 volumes in print

Colour image bank: including 1600 images from the V&A Museum`s internationally renowned fashion collection and 2000 from the Encyclopedia

COUNTER compliant usage statistics and library branding for users within the institution

Marc21 records (from publication)

Customisation tools for individual needs

Social networking tools provided so that items within the portal can be shared by means of users’ tags and links

Extensive online help and customer and technical support

Sneak Peek:

Cross-searchable functionality with Berg fashion e-journals Fashion Theory, Fashion Practice, and Textile for mutual subscribers. Available as part of the first update (early 2011)Classic and Modern Writings on Fashion – 67 primary documents and seminal essays on the subject of fashion

Two thousand images from The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which will be added in stages from 2011 onwards.